A bunch of stuff about my video production life

Tag Archives: corporate video production

Retail City, the Truman Show set of Canadian Tire Corp. In this warehouse in East York (Toronto) you will find the most incredible find ever found…if you can find it. Retail City. The first time that I went to Retail City I was blown away! Imagine this…you walk into the building, a normal looking warehouse building just like any other and after being buzzed in by the receptionist you proceed to walk down a lengthy hallway. The hallway is like any other hallway that you might have walked down before, walls, ceiling, well-lit, you know…pretty hallway-ish. As you walk down this hall, on the right-hand side wall you see this “thing”, and as you draw nearer to the end of the hallway you realize that the “thing” is a large square button. A sign beside the button reads “Press the Magic Button”, and as any naturally curious human being would, you push the button. The large double door slides open when you press it and the parting of the wood and metal with a sound that can only be described as the Magic Button sound reveals…a Canadian Tire store. I’m talking about a full sized front of a store.. inside this warehouse. And that’s not all! As you walk through the front doors of this inside-the-warehouse Canadian Tire you emerge into a fully stocked, current flyer offerings and sale items displayed, up to date with seasonal stock Canadian Tire store. There are cash registers, displays, isles, auto dept, sports, housewares…everything that you’d find in a regular CT store, except the people. It’s a “lab” or testing environment for CT to set up displays for dealers to see how they are supposed to dress their store, for Executives to come by to see how the latest CT products will be displayed and sold, to train, to experiment and the best part…to shoot video! Imagine a CT store with no people, looks just like a CT store, and is current with seasonal offerings as my set for shooting video.

I was introduced to Retail City in my first month at CT and have had the opportunity to shoot there many, many times. You’ve probably seen CT commercials that have been shot there and not even known it. I had that opportunity again last week as Brad, Charles and I set out to shoot a Christmas Strategy video for one of the top Executive at CT to kick off the Christmas season.

We scouted the location the week before and decided that we were going to do a 3 camera shoot (the Sony PWM-350 and two Canon 7D) and we hired our regular audio guy, Brian, to help us out with the 2 person audio recording. We had Brian send audio to the Sony camera since it doesn’t suffer from the 12 minute recording limit that the Canon 7D’s do, and we also recorded separate audio to an Olympus recorder (not sure of the model but it is a device similar to the Zoom h4n). It was a simple enough shoot…until the entire script was changed last-minute. I wanted to make sure that this thing was easy to edit so I quickly jumped in with a couple of suggestions on how to make this an easy process. The key thing for me this day was to ensure that each scene consisted of 1 question and the answer to that question only, allowing us to do retakes easily as well as making it easy to log good takes. Being that I needed to edit this the next day (today), I really wanted it to be easy in the edit room, and sice it was a 3 camera shoot, cutting to another camera to fake that everthing was one seamless conversation wouldn’t be hard at all. Another thing that we did to ensure ease in post-production was using the slate or the clapper. By using a slate (to indicate the scene number and take) and actually clapping it (to create a visual and audible sync point that all cameras can see and hear) I was able to very easily use the Multicam feature of FCP7 (this feature does not yet exist in FCPX…but hopefully it will soon).

The shoot was a 2 person interview with a nice Christmas display for the backdrop. The main cam (Sony PMW-350) was the 2 shot and each of the Canon DSLRs shot a single of each person, giving me plenty of footage to be able to cut between. We lit the set with two large softboxes with 650watt tungsten bulbs and used two 500watt Tota bulbs as backlights. As usual, I was equipped with my Zacuto EVF which proved to be very valuable on this shoot because I had to man 2 cameras and viewing them both at the same time would have been very difficult without the EVF, so thanks again Zacuto! Brad was styling out with a Jag35 Field Runner kitted out with the D|Focus from D|Focus Systems (Good look Brad), and we were both outfitted with a medium range zoom lens on our cams.

So, the interview was smooth, b-roll was shot, the set was striked and we left to head back to CT in the Community Events Vehicle to backup and start to transcode the footage (turn it into a format that my editing system likes…not necessarily what the camera spits out). I love shooting with this team (Charles, Brad and Myself), we work like a well oiled machine from packing, to setup, to communicating our thoughts on shooting right through to the actual shoot, striking (teardown), backing up footage and getting ready for post-production. So, all-in-all, a great shoot day, great team, a fake/ real CT store to shoot in and the talent did it all in about 45 minutes…maybe this really is CT’s version of the Trueman Show.

So it’s convention time again at Canadian Tire and since we are so accustomed to “going big”, we are headed to Vegas this time. Last year we were at the Toronto Convention Center and it was a really huge, really cool, 5 day convention for all of the Canadian Tire Dealers (the guys that own the stores) and their managers, auto guys, seasonal people etc. There were business sessions, a huge product exhibition, parties, galas, awards banquets and a show featuring Randy Bachman! There were celeb athletes and personalities there like Cesar Millan, Ron Fellows, Scott Steckly and Lanny MacDonald and of course I can’t forget the cameo appearances by the Stanley Cup and the Nascar Sprint Cup. It was great! Our main hall for seminars etc. had 3 screens in it, 1 super-wide screen for the “Spyder System” projection and 2 regular 16:9 screens flanking it. The main screen was the backdrop for the stage which had either a Nascar or Ferrari on it depending on the day that it was. I got the distinct honor and pleasure of being the designer for the main graphics that were used on that super wide screen! (see pic below). In designing for it, I had a bunch of considerations; Designing in the 16:9 center portion of the screen so that the video could be projected on the “regular” screens as well as the center screen without cutting off content, design resolution and the ability to update and change screen info on the fly were some of the biggies.

This year the screen resolution is even wider than last years was…a 5:1 aspect ratio with a full resolution of 3840×768! HUGE! And again, I am having concerns about the design resolution because it is so big. Not just the size that’s concerning me though, I am dealing with motion graphics, so I want the best quality that I can get, so I am creating in a “draft mode”, but will be exporting at full res, 16bit, Field Rendering, Motion Blurring, Depth of Field on my flying camera and Frame Blending…and I have to create 30 of these things. “Hey Joe…what in the world did you just say?” (you might ask)… In a nutshell, you need a pretty beefy comp to export this size and quality (I might respond). Lucky I have one, but it’s always a concern. I just have to be extra technical when designing this to ensure efficiency with my data rates. “NERD” (you might say…)I guess so, I might respond. 🙂

Like last years animation, I have had to go back to the drawing board after showing preliminary drafts to the team and managers but unlike last year, I didn’t find going back to the drawing board as hard. I was trained and taught that a lot of the time I am the outlet through which people (clients) fulfill their thoughts and ideas about video and messaging. All I can do is advise, suggest and do…and this is sometimes way harder than you’d think, trust me! Last year, when I had to reign back on the creative, I felt like my vision wasn’t being appreciated, like the company was playing it too safe, like we could do so much more but at the same time I understood why we had to take a step back. This year, when the same thing was happening…”let’s reel it in a bit and play it safe“, I found myself thinking, “Joe, have thick skin and don’t take offense“. And I didn’t! I really didn’t have any emotional feelings attached to the work at all. Even though I had just spent the last day working on the animation, it didn’t bother me to return to the animation and start to change things up. Imaging how much easier it is starting over with no bad feelings…FREEDOM! And, growth. I definitely didn’t start off this way almost 12 years ago.

“Why are you telling me this” (you might ask)… “Because… (I would say back to you), in this line of work you rarely work for yourself”. That being the case, the logical other side of the coin is that we work for others. Others ideas, others messaging, others visions and sometimes even others mistakes…but it is “others”. All I can do is suggest, advise and recommend based on my experience; creative and technical and then do what the client asks. It used to kill me to think someone wanted me to change hours or days worth of work that I had put it. “How dare they ask me to change that, don’t they know that was my favorite part of the video?!” Now, I try to let it roll off the shoulder. Sometimes it is harder than others, but I guess it’s like practicing anything else in life, it gets easier and we learn how to do it better.